Leigh in Azerbaijan

While we only had three days this week due to snow days, we get to make up one of the days in a couple of weeks, when we lose a public holiday in an effort to maintain the promised 180 days of school days.

The snow has diminished a little but the footpaths are still dangerous with several inches of ice. They don’t know about using rock salt here to dissolve the ice. I asked our classroom cleaner this afternoon when last it was this cold and when they had so much snow. She said it was about 20 years ago. On our first day back there were 96 kids away in the primary school - presumably finding it hard to get to school on snow clogged, icy roads. Numbers have risen each day since.

Several of our teachers are without water with frozen pipes. Mark, goes out to his balcony to collect snow so that he can drink, cook, wash and flush. He’s worked out he can melt more snow efficiently if he takes the first saucepan of cooked snow out to the balcony to fill again with snow. Sam is also without his Soviet piped heating so lives in one room with another heater. One of our new buildings at school is open underneath and today it was announced that the pipes are frozen (having suffered temps of -14C) - no more going to the bathroom up there.

Consensus is that Baku was not prepared for this spell of icy weather.